The journalist claiming to be Robert F. Kennedy’s “digital lover” is out of yet another media gig.
Vanity Fair announced Friday it would not renew the contract of Oliva Nuzzi, 32, who was accused last month of having an affair with a second politician twice her age she was reporting on.
“Vanity Fair and Olivia Nuzzi have mutually agreed, in the best interest of the magazine, to let her contract expire at the end of the year,” said its publisher, Condé Nast, in a statement obtained by The New York Times.
Vanity Fair did not cite a specific reason not to renew Nuzzi.
The only article Nuzzi had published in the magazine was an excerpt from her newly released book, American Canto, which details her affair with Kennedy. Reviews of the book, which The Atlantic slammed this week as a “Tell-Nothing Memoir,” have been not-so-stellar, to say the least.
Nuzzi was controversially hired as Vanity Fair’s “West Coast Editor” in September, a year after New York magazine fired her for developing a relationship with Kennedy, 71, while covering his campaign.
Nuzzi’s future at the magazine has been in question for weeks amid her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, repeatedly dropping bombshell claims that have called her journalistic integrity further into question.
Lizza, 51, wrote that Nuzzi had unofficially advised the 2024 Kennedy campaign, going so far as to try to kill one of the many unsavory stories that roiled his White House bid, and of sleeping with another previous reporting subject, the 65-year-old ex-GOP lawmaker Mark Sanford.
Lizza, formerly of Politico, has made bombshell revelations about Nuzzi as part of an ongoing series he publishes to his Substack.
Nuzzi and Lizza have hit out at each other in interviews amid the drama, with the latest back-and-forth coming on Thursday.
“I knew the second that I poked my head up from my exile, I was probably going to be met by some madman charging at me with an ax,” Nuzzi told the Wall Street Journal, referring to her ex. “I didn’t know which madman it was going to be.”
Lizza responded in a statement to the paper, saying, “Telling the truth is not harassment and accountability is not an ax, though I understand why Olivia finds it unpleasant to be confronted with her treachery and betrayal.”
He added that he plans to “expose Olivia’s scheme to use false charges to silence me and prevent the public from learning the truth” in future posts to his Substack.
A lawyer for Nuzzi, who previously wrote for the Daily Beast, denied that she had an inappropriate relationship with any reporting subjects other than Kennedy, denying Lizza’s claim that she slept with Sanford while covering his failed GOP presidential bid in 2019.
“In ‘American Canto,’ Ms. Nuzzi discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering,” said her attorney, Ari Wilkenfeld, in a statement to the Journal. “Ms. Nuzzi will not dignify efforts to impugn her character with any future response.”
Representatives for Kennedy, who has been married to actress Cheryl Hines since 2014, did not respond to a request for comment. He has denied having an affair with Nuzzi.
